Korean Job Discussion Forums

[stevemcgarrett]

BJWD:

Does your username stand for "Buffoon of Japanese War Defense" or "Brother of Japanese Whitewash and Denial?"

[jinju]

[shakuhachi]

First up, Prime Minister Abe was misquoted. He did not deny all instances of coercion, only that the Japanese authorities did not going around hunting women and pressing them into service.

Second, one of the Korean "comfort women" testifying before the US House Committee has been giving contradictory testimony. She has told 4 different stories about what happened to her. See here and here.

A contemporary US army report describes the conditions of the comfort women. It is completely different to what is being described here. This document should have been examined by the Congressional Committee considering House Resolution 121, but they did not. Instead, they relied on unreliable testimony, and they did not test the testimony against the available evidence.

Ampontan has a good post about how Prime Minister Abe became the victim of spin, and how the media mistranslated and willfully distorted his comments.

The comfort woman issue is a very complex one. In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that many (probably not most) were in fact forced to become comfort women. Since the Japanese were in charge at the time, ultimately the buck stops with them, but I think that the current comfort women controversy is about attacking the current Japanese government while shifting all the blame to Japan, when Korean (and Japanese) societal attitudes towards women was a significant factor in what happened to the women.

While there are testimonies that claim they were abducted by the Japanese army, the Japanese government has not been able to find any documentary evidence anywhere to support that ever happening, even once. I suppose that does not mean that it never happened, but it certainly does indicate that it was not systematic, and that it was not the policy of the government.

There is also confusion about the meaning of �comfort women�, as many people include battlefield rape victims as among the comfort women.

So why does PM Abe risk looking like �holocaust denier� to dispute the point that the Japanese army was actually involved in rounding up these women? It is simple. That small fact changes the meaning of the comfort woman from one that was for most people a completely legitimate and legal system of prostitution with a number of cases of genuine abuses, to one where every single woman was kidnapped by the Japanese army and forced into sexual slavery.

The Japanese government is in a pickle. On one hand, there are people saying they were abused at the comfort stations, and some say they were forced to go there by Japanese soldiers. On the other hand, the Japanese government cannot find any documents indicating that Japanese soldiers did round up women. However, the Japanese government cannot prove a negative, and even in the largely voluntary system of prostitution that we have in the west, there are still cases of abuse.

The other problem is that yes, there WERE women that were forced to have sex. Not really sex slaves, since they were paid, but yes, the system was set up in a way that did not respect individual and female rights. Among the willing prostitutes there were also girls that were sold by their parents, either to a kisaeng house (a traditional Korean geisha brothel) who then sold them to the army, or directly to third party brokers/recruiters for the Japanese army. Selling to the Japanese army meant that a girl would work a 6-12 month contract before she could come home.

What this means is that many of the girls would actually have either been pressured by their family to do it, or conceivably in some cases, told by their family and recruiters a lie about what the job entailed. So in this sense, some of the girls would have been forced. Japanese and Korean society at the time did not give much attention to individual or womens rights, so there would be little the girls could do to protect their rights, especially once money changed hands. Once the family received the advance, which is as much as 3000 yen (to put it in perspective, a common soldier got 10 yen a month), that was the end. Whether she wanted to be a prostitute or not, she would have to either work at the comfort station, or pay back the advance, and if she had the money to pay back the advance, she wouldn�t be in that situation in the first place. I am sure you can imagine what would happen if a �comfort woman�, who�s family had received the advance, refused to have sex at the comfort station. Once the contract was done in 6-12 months, she could return home, along with the additional money she earned at the comfort station, said to be 750 yen per month.

So the situation is that Japan was in control at the time, so the buck stops with them. However, it would also be wrong to impose the present societal attitudes in judging the past. Both Korean and Japanese people have a long history, up until after the second half of the 20th century, of selling their female family members. Koreans did not respect their women either, so it is not right for them to attack Japan unilaterally on this issue.

I find it not only likely, but almost inevitable that these kinds of abuses took place, given the state of society in Japan and Korea. Parents pressuring and selling their daughters should have been forbidden, but I think there would have been a lot of people that thought that as long as the parents agreed to it, then the girls were not being forced.

So the issue is very complex. The US House Resolution has strawmanned the comfort woman controversy to death by asserting that every single one of the 200,000 mostly Korean comfort women (and that number is a matter of disputation) was forced into it by the Japanese army and their agents, and that the women were sex slaves, and that all this could be kept a secret until the 1980s. 200,000 missing women would have been a story of undeniable historical significance, and it would have been known from the moment that women started to be kidnapped. The claim that 200,000 women were kidnapped by the Japanese army and their agents takes place in a historical void. No contempory document, diary, newspaper, or anything else even mentions it. It simply did not happen.

[chris_J2]

What about the Kono Statement, which provides irrefutable evidence that the Japanese military was directly involved?

http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/women/fund/state9308.html

http://english.chosun.com/cgi-bin/printNews?id=200703050022

[stevemcgarrett]

shakuhachi:

I almost didn't want to dignify your post with a reply. Suffice it to say your observations are either misinformed or you're in complete denial.

The Japanese Army systematically conceived and implemented a system of sexual slavery for its soldiers. If one former comfort woman gives conflicting testimony or even a couple dozen it won't diminish the extent of the crime.

Your link to the article about Abe being misquoted shows him obfuscating and engaging in political parsing of the worst sort. Reminds me of Clinton trying to rationalize that oral sex wasn't sex. Sorry, but homey don't play that.

The sheer fact that Abe would even entertain a response to such pointed questions in anything less than a condemnatory manner is by itself despicable and he deserves any spin he might have received. Call it what you want but if it quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it's probably a duck.

And the shrine visits by his predecessor are inexcusable in any case.

[shakuhachi]

[chris_J2]

shakuhachi:

Go back & read the quoted excerpt from the Kono Statement.

If there is no evidence, as you claim, then why is the Japanese Government apologising?

[shakuhachi]

[chris_J2]

Racism? The website I linked to for the Kono Statement is the official Japanese Government website! And the research findings were by a respected Japanese academic, (Yoshimi Yoshiaki) no less!

From Wikipedia, (continuing on from a list of reasons why court cases by surviving comfort women cannot be heard):

"However, in 1992, the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered incriminating documents in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency indicating that the military was directly involved in running the brothels (by, for example, selecting the agents who recruited). [15] When Yoshimi's findings were published in the Japanese media on January 12, 1993, they caused a sensation and forced the government, represented by Chief Cabinet Secretary, Kato Koichi, to acknowledge some of the facts the same day. On January 17, Prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa presented formal apologies for the suffering of the victims during a trip to South Korea. On July 6 and August 4, the Japanese governments issued two statements by which it recognized that "Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military of the day", that "The Japanese military was directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of the women" and that the women "were recruited in many cases against their own will through coaxing and coercion".[16] Since then, Japan's official position has been one of admitting "moral but not legal" responsibility."

[shakuhachi]

[chris_J2]

[mithridates]

Abe was pretty badly mistranslated, I checked it out myself.

「当初定義されていた強制性を裏付ける証拠がなかったのは事実だ」

And -

「定義が大きく変わったことを前提に考えなければならない」

does not equal

�There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it,� Mr. Abe told reporters. �So, in respect to this declaration, you have to keep in mind that things have changed greatly.�

I would translate it as:

"The fact is that there's no proof to support any coercion as defined at the time" and "we need to keep in mind/work on the assumption that the definition has changed a great deal."

I don't know anything about the kono declaration though.

[shakuhachi]

[stevemcgarrett]

shaku:

What's really pathetic is your insistence on defending Abe over semantics about the meaning of coercion. No matter how you slice it, it still means by use of force or against one's will. Stop the word gymnastics and get to the heart of the matter. The Japanese exploited these women for their own selfish purposes. Even if it bears out that Abe was misquoted, he and his government are still stonewalling and dissembling. If you and mith and the other apologists can't see that, well that's your problem.

[thepeel]